How Sound effects and Music built our Recording

As I have said in my previous posts, Sound Effects, Music and other Micro Elements are all needed to build up a radio recording, As we saved our recording after each session as we went along it was easy for me to go back and cut some clips out of what we have done and take a look at the importance of combining Micro Elements together when creating a recording. 

CLIP ONE: Beginning of Scene One, Lt. Justice has just pulled into the crime scene and is narrating his surroundings. 

This clip was taken from when we first imported our recording into Soundtrack Pro, If you listen to the clip you can see that it is hard to imagine what is going on in the story and where exactly the character is, even though Lt. Justice is explaining where he is there is still no background noise to aid the listener into imagining the scene. 

This clip was taken from half way through our editing stage, we had almost finished editing scene one. We decided to add the sound of cars going by as Lt. Justice had just pulled off the road into an alley way, we liked using this particular sound effect as it has a doppler effect where the cars seem to go from one side to the other, this is good as it sounds like the cars are traveling past our character. 

This clip was taken towards the end of our editing, we were almost finished but decided to go through to see if there were any parts we could improve on, we decided we could make this scene sound better by possibly adding more effects. We looked through the archive on Soundtrack Pro and found a sound effect of a Helicopter flying over. We added this over the top of our recording to make the city sound busier, we did have to turn the levels of each sound effect down so it sounded like background noise and just just an effect slapped over the top of our voices! 

CLIP TWO - Scene Three, The Sconer and Abi are discussing what they are going to do as they are about to be rumbled by the police. They are in La Boosh Bar having a drink amongst other people. 


This clip was taken from when we first imported our recording into Soundtrack Pro, If you listen to this clip it would be absolutely impossible to tell that the two characters are sitting in a bar as both of them do not even say anything about where they are. 

We decided to add some general background talking over our recording to try and make a bar style ambience to give a clue about where our characters are, however we decided this would still not be enough to help our listener imagine where our characters were. We also had to adjust the levels of the sound effects as it was hard to hear our main dialogue. 

The final effect we added was a piece of music we found from the college sound library, this worked perfectly and it now sounded like the characters were in a public place with lots of people, the general talking in the background was clearly recorded in an indoor environment as there is no other background noises such as wind. The music complimented the background noise as it suggests they are in a place to socialize. We choose Jazz music so it would fit in with the name of our bar that appeared in the script and made the venue sound a little classier. 

CLIP THREE - Scene Two, Lt. Justice is in his office narrating his thoughts on the crime case he is working on, He becomes tired and decides to open the window to get some fresh air. 

This clip was taken from when we first imported our recording into Soundtrack Pro, You can tell that Lt. Justice is in an office environment as he mentions sitting at a desk and looking through some paperwork, however he says in the recording "I opened the window to let in some air." We decided that it would be a good idea to include some kind of effect to show that a window is being opened. 

We added a "Window Opening" sound effect on the clip to show that as he was narrating what he was doing he was moving to open the window at the same time, however this would not be enough, we needed some kind of street noise to go along with the opening of the window. 

Lt. Justice says "The sounds of the busy nightlife flooded through the window." We found some street noise and sampled it without the window to see if it would go well, we adjusted the levels so the effect increased in volume whilst the window was being opened. 

This was the final clip from this scene, We agreed that the two sound clips worked well together so put them together to make the clip work. 

The end of the clip has some high levels of sound which seem to clash with each other, so after this stage we went into the level editor and adjusted each channel so they all sounded right.